Not long before his death Childe sent ‘affectionate letters’ to all his friends, including Agatha Christie. The Mallowans stayed on as tenants at the Lawn Road Flats until June 1948 and remained close to Childe. As the director of the Institute of Archaeology, Childe was Max Mallowan's immediate boss and he helped Max secure the chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology. Mallowan undoubtedly liked Childe and in his autobiography made a number of favourable references to him; Agatha Christie, however, doesn't mention him at all.

Max Mallowan had returned to England from Cairo in May 1945. As the war drew to its close Agatha Christie became ‘completely unnerved’ by the thought that her husband might have changed in his absence, or find her different, and in some panic she had rushed of to her daughter, Rosalind, in Wales for the weekend. On the Sunday evening she travelled back to London on ‘one of those trains’, she recalled in her autobiography, ‘one had so often to endure in wartime, freezing cold, and of course when one got to Paddington there was no means of getting anywhere’. She managed to board ‘some complicated train’ which despatched her at ‘a station in Hampstead not too far away from the Lawn Road Flats’, and from there she ‘walked home’ carrying her suitcase and some kippers wrapped in a brown paper parcel: